The networked computing environment (e.g., cloud computing environment) is an enhancement to the predecessor grid environment, whereby multiple grids and other computation resources may be further enhanced by one or more additional abstraction layers (e.g., a cloud layer), thus making disparate devices appear to an end-consumer as a single pool of seamless resources. These resources may include such things as physical or logical computing engines, servers and devices, device memory, and storage devices, among others.
One of the advantages of using a cloud computing deployment and development environment are the flexibility, reliability, and scalability features that a cloud environment may offer. For example, it may be possible to generate new instances of cloud resources for development, and to disengage the cloud resources when they are no longer needed. Oftentimes, there may be multiple resources (e.g., data centers) within a cloud environment that are available. Each such resource may have its own distinct advantages and/or disadvantages such as network speed, data transfer rate, cost, etc. Challenges may exist, however, in that it may be time consuming to manually examine and analyze such characteristics when identifying a resource instance for testing and/or processing projects/workloads.